Anna Karenina eBook

Since their conversation about religion when they
were engaged neither of them had ever started a discussion
of the subject, but she performed all the ceremonies
of going to church, saying her prayers, and so on,
always with the unvarying conviction that this ought
to be so. In spite of his assertion to the contrary,
she was firmly persuaded that he was as much a Christian
as she, and indeed a far better one; and all that
he said about it was simply one of his absurd masculine
freaks, just as he would say about her broderie
anglaise that good people patch holes, but that
she cut them on purpose, and so on.

“Yes, you see this woman, Marya Nikolaevna,
did not know how to manage all this,” said Levin.
“And...I must own I’m very, very glad
you came. You are such purity that....”
He took her hand and did not kiss it (to kiss her
hand in such closeness to death seemed to him improper);
he merely squeezed it with a penitent air, looking
at her brightening eyes.

“It would have been miserable for you to be
alone,” she said, and lifting her hands which
hid her cheeks flushing with pleasure, twisted her
coil of hair on the nape of her neck and pinned it
there. “No,” she went on, “she
did not know how.... Luckily, I learned a lot
at Soden.”

“Surely there are not people there so ill?”

“Worse.”

“What’s so awful to me is that I can’t
see him as he was when he was young. You would
not believe how charming he was as a youth, but I
did not understand him then.”

“I can quite, quite believe it. How I
feel that we might have been friends!” she said;
and, distressed at what she had said, she looked round
at her husband, and tears came into her eyes.

“Yes, might have been,” he said
mournfully. “He’s just one of those
people of whom they say they’re not for this
world.”

“But we have many days before us; we must go
to bed,” said Kitty, glancing at her tiny watch.

Chapter 20

The next day the sick man received the sacrament and
extreme unction. During the ceremony Nikolay
Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes, fastened
on the holy image that was set out on a card table
covered with a colored napkin, expressed such passionate
prayer and hope that it was awful to Levin to see it.
Levin knew that this passionate prayer and hope would
only make him feel more bitterly parting from the
life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and
the workings of his intellect: he knew that his
unbelief came not from life being easier for him without
faith, but had grown up because step by step the contemporary
scientific interpretation of natural phenomena crushed
out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that
his present return was not a legitimate one, brought
about by way of the same working of his intellect,
but simply a temporary, interested return to faith
in a desperate hope of recovery. Levin knew too